The Hotel Room In Mombasa
The room had a single window that did not quite close, and through the gap at the top came, at all hours, the sound of the sea, and the sound of the crows, and, in the evenings of that last week of December, the sound of the loudspeakers from the rally that had taken place in the field behind the hotel. The fan on the ceiling turned in an uneven rhythm. The bed had a mosquito net that had been new in perhaps 1989 and had been mended, since then, many times. The writing desk under the window was the reason I had chosen the hotel, because I had filed from this desk once before, in 2002, and it had brought me nothing but good copy.
I had flown down from Nairobi on the twenty-sixth. By the twenty-ninth I had seen enough at the polling stations in the constituency to know what I was going to write, and by the thirtieth I had not written it, because what I had seen did not match what the stringer in Nairobi was telling me the official figures would say, and I was waiting, with the thin patience that a man of my age and my salary can still sometimes afford, to see whether the figures would be corrected or whether my eyes would be.
On the evening of the thirtieth I wrote the first draft at the desk by the window. It was a straight piece, in the house style: a correspondent's despatch, datelined Mombasa, in the measured voice of the magazine, nothing rhetorical, nothing unanchored. It